POP MUSIC : 10 QUESTIONS : Rock’s Avatar of Alienation

R obert Smith explores dread, loss and loneliness in grand, haunting musical structures and sings in a piping, little-boy-hurt voice. His band, the Cure, band released its first album in 1979 and was embraced by a subculture that grooved to the Gothic sounds, took solace in Smith’s existential pain and emulated his appearance, adopting haystack haircuts, pallid complexions, makeup and black garb.

Then the uncharacteristically playful 1987 album, “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me , “ launched the English group into an arc of mass popularity. The “Disintegration,� album in 1989 hit No. 1, and the Cure’s tour that year found them playing four stadium concerts, including a date at Dodger Stadium. The current U.S. tour--supporting the band’s 13th album, “Wish�--is similarly designed, peppering its arena shows (the band plays the Long Beach Arena tonight and the San Diego Sports Arena on Tuesday) with a few stadium dates (it will be at the Rose Bowl on Saturday).

This is the first time in years that Smith hasn’t announced that the current tour will be the Cure’s last. “I think people just take that for granted now, don’t they?� says the singer-guitarist, whose regularly aired uncertainty about the future of the band is one of the ways he keeps its course open and unpredictable.

The mass scale is a matter of concern rather than pure celebration for Smith, a thoughtful keeper of the Cure aesthetic who weighs the implications of the band’s every gesture. The adulation he encountered on the last tour made him uncomfortable personally, and he wondered about the effect of the wider audience on the original core fans. Those questions remain.

While Smith’s public persona might be the Avatar of Alienation, he also enjoys mundane pursuits that might surprise his romanticizing disciples--he’s a football fan and is known as a good drinking buddy. That’s an activity he’s trying to moderate now that he’s three years past 30 .

Question: Is getting older as bad as you thought it would be ?

Answer: At times it is, yeah. At other times it isn’t. Turning 30 was a real landmark that was just stuck there in the middle of my head for years, but once I got past it and nothing drastic happened . . . I tend to have a bit more of a carefree attitude about everything again.

I don’t think I’m quite as absurd as I used to be . . . I know that inevitably I would just damage myself irreparably (by drinking), and I don’t really see the point. I think that I’ve had enough fun exploring certain avenues in the past 15 years and I think maybe I should try something else less physically demanding.

Q: What’s it been like in recent years, going from cult favorites to mass success? What’s the effect been on you personally?

A: I sometimes get a bit bitter that I can’t go out without attracting attention, but then it’s a very small complaint considering all the advantages. Having said that, I don’t really think I am a famous person. There’s a kind of level that you can attain--I’m talking about like a Michael Jackson sort of level--that really destroys any chance of having a normal life. But I don’t think that we’ll ever get to that level. I mean, I’ll make sure that we never do.

Q: Has that success had an effect on your music?

A: I think probably for the first time, writing the words for this record, I was aware they were words that people were gonna sit and listen to and possibly analyze. It was kind of double-edged. It made me think harder and longer about what I was writing, but looking back it probably meant I contrived a lot more than I would have done otherwise.

But I think that’s the only effect. Musically we tend to just do what we want and we don’t care if anyone likes it or not. This album cost as much money as the one before it and the one before that. So we haven’t gone into expensive agonizing over our art just because we think a lot of people are gonna listen to it.

Q: What are the major influences on your style?

A: Musically it was a pretty normal kind of background, I think. I listened to lots of the glam stuff and before that I listened to the ‘60s stuff. I think I probably had an influence around the time of (1980’s) “Seventeen Seconds,� which is really when I started to think that the Cure could do something in a more serious vein . . . I had by then started reading some quite sort of weighty literature and listening to a bit more classical music. But I didn’t lock myself away and read exclusively doomy or Gothic novels. I’ve always tried to read a breadth of stuff. I think basically all it is is that a lot of the moods that we’ve captured stem from the lyrics that I write, and they’re written when I feel slightly less than happy. That’s the simplest explanation really.

Q: Your music seems to matter so much to your core audience. Did any musicians have that impact on you?

A: Well, certainly initially Jimi Hendrix. He’s the person I can remember listening to when I was young and thinking that he was someone that was doing something quite extraordinary. He’s probably the only musical figure that I’ve really admired. Nick Drake (the melancholy English singer-songwriter who died 1974) is another one. It was the year that he died, I got (his album) “Five Leaves Left,� and that had a big influence on me. Nothing really through the ‘70s, till ‘79--someone gave me (Van Morrison’s 1968 album) “Astral Weeks.� Around the same time I discovered Gregorian chant and I used to listen to that endlessly for a period of about a year. And Eric Satie.

Q: Do you consciously try to inspire your fans the way those artists inspired you?

A: There have been maybe three or four occasions in the whole time we’ve been doing it when I felt that we’ve done something that is gonna affect people in the way that I’ve been affected by music. Certainly when we did “Faith� on the “Faith� album, it had an enormous effect on me and I thought if it’s working like this on me, it must work like this on at least one other person in the world.

And the “Pornography� album as a whole, I realized when we were doing it, in my fleeting lucid moments, that we were involved in something that was quite wild. And I think probably some of the stuff on the “Kiss Me� album. . . . We managed to get something into a few songs on there that is very unusual--a kind of life that sort of transcended just being another song.

And certain parts of “Disintegration.� By that time, we’d reached a level where I thought, “This is gonna influence and affect people,� because I had by then received enough mail to confirm my suspicions that we were influencing people’s lives. It’s a really gratifying part of what we do, when you receive mail that says, “You’ve helped me, you’ve made me feel like I wasn’t the only person in the world who felt like this.�

Q: Is there a down side to that kind of fan devotion?

A: We’ll meet people after the show, and the way they look at me I can tell that they think I’m something more than human, and that’s the worrying side of it. I’m sort of up there inhabiting the same world that I used to think Jimi Hendrix inhabited. I didn’t actually think that he went to sleep or went to the bathroom, that sort of thing. It dawns on me from time to time that for some people I’ve probably reached that mythical plane. . . . When I’m confronted with it I take a step toward people to try and have a conversation, but they take a step back; they want to retain that same distance. It’s a bit strange.

Q: But that’s probably only a fraction of your total audience. Once you start playing stadiums, a lot of people are just showing up because it’s the thing to do. At the Dodger Stadium show, for instance, some people spent their whole time in a huge food fight. How do you feel about that?

A: It’s very difficult because there’s a kind of inverted snobbery that exists--and I’m guilty of it as much as anyone--that if a group that you really like suddenly becomes popular you fight against yourself to keep liking that group purely on their musical merits. Somehow you lose something, you lose that feeling that you’re special.

I realize that if we haven’t lost it already we probably will lose it on this tour for a lot of people. Particularly when we play like the Rose Bowl. I’ll be looking into the audience, and despite myself I’ll be thinking there are people who don’t look like they like the Cure, and if I were in the audience, I’d be upset because I would want everyone to have that same kind of intensity of vision and I would want everyone to feel as deeply and keenly about the group as I do.

Q: Did you resist the move to stadiums and all that playing them brings?

A: It’s a difficult position to be put in. Before we did the “Disintegration� tour, we were worried about that--should we do the stadiums? Not because like would we be able to pull it off, but would we actually alienate a small but very significant section of the people who are partly responsible for what the group is?

Q: Is there anything positive about that scale of success?

A: People have said they like the idea that we’re their special group and we can go out and sort of surprise everyone by playing Dodger Stadium or the Rose Bowl and getting to No. 1 and stuff like that, and yet still no one really knows who we are. And that is a strange kind of phenomenon--despite becoming more and more successful, people aren’t really sure who we are. They’ll think it’s some kind of weird anomaly that we’re playing a stadium.

(Keyboardist) Roger (O’Donnell) was in the Psychedelic Furs before he joined the Cure, and he said they were always asking their manager why the Cure were playing bigger and bigger places and they weren’t. And he kept saying to them, “It’s a phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon.� And after the third year of the phenomenon, they forced him to give them another explanation. But I think that’s really what people think about us. They think eventually that we’ll go away. And eventually we will, but. . . .